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A Relic of Time: Fordite
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Henry Ford had a famous partiality to black cars. “Any colour so long as it’s black,” you may recognise as a widely cited but perhaps shoddily substantiated paraphrasing of Ford’s philosophy on ornamentation. Plucked from a wider discussion about his function-over-form approach to his product, his monochromatic preferences run inextricably throughout the rest of what makes him an inimitable precursor to late capitalism. In reality, his Model T retailed in a handful of colours. But owning a car at this point in time was a novelty, and personal expression through colour wasn’t yet a significant determinant of market offerings. In the early 20th century, drab hues like black, grey, dark blue and brown prevailed the roadways.

By the 1950s, American streets looked a bit different. Post-war sentiments of euphoria were reflected in candy-coloured hues and an abundance of chrome in consumer vehicles. Dodge famously created the “LaFemme” model, which was outfitted with special umbrella and lipstick holders for the ladies, and painted fairy floss pink. Almost every car at the time was hand-painted on an assembly line. The era particularly popularised multi-colour jobs, wherein separate parts were masked and sprayed by hand with various paints. For a clean finish, a strip of chrome inevitably covered the imperfect lines between colours (interestingly enough, today’s classic car restorers duplicate this factory sloppiness for authenticity’s sake).

The method was labour-intensive, but imprecise. Part after part was sent down the line and sprayed, ultimately resulting in a ton of superfluous paint, which would collect and clog within the assembly line tracks. As the cars baked in a massive oven, the cumulative deposits were also subject to extreme heat, hardening alongside them. Eventually the layers of petrified paint would interfere with the movement of the tracks and need to be chipped off.

Shrewd workers soon discovered that once these mounds of enamel slag were cut and polished, they revealed a dazzling array of colourful rings, similar to those found naturally within agate stone. They began to create jewellery out of the unique fragments, or they took them home as souvenirs. The automotive relics are today referred to as “Fordite”, “Detroit agate” or “motor agate”.

Its semi-eponymous doppelgänger, agate, is born from a naturally-occurring, brutal concoction of volcanic heat and relentless pressure with a wait time of a few thousand (or million) years. And while it carries a sense of living, breathing time within it, Fordite feels temporally stunted in comparison – an ephemeral relic confined to a few decades in a particular place. The months it takes to build up layers of paint are still a fraction of the duration it takes to create agate – Fordite’s space of conception is a space of manufactural efficiency, after all. It isn’t meticulously crafted, although like agate, it’s a beautifully-packaged phenomenon of the right elements interacting at the right place and time. Art imitates life, history repeats itself.

To me, an interesting concept of simulacrum evoked by Fordite is its ability to tell time. Within agate, the inner rings document a story that is dictated entirely by chance occurrences in nature, spread out over thousands of years. You may be able to trace an agate specimen back to an ancient volcanic eruption in Brazil or a glacial event around the area of Lake Superior that occurred billions of years ago. The layers within Fordite tell a different narrative, one of market trends and consumer preferences. While early bits of Fordite are primarily monochromatic, a piece from the 1960s could be comprised of dozens of hues like sea-foam green, bright yellow, metallic violet, and pearlescent rings resembling oil slick. The most coveted pieces contain colours that are today very rare or no longer available.

The process of hand-painting cars is now largely defunct, at least in the mass production sense. These days the process is fully automated, with paint administered to such programmed accuracy that several layers never surmount to more than one-tenth of a millimetre in thickness, rendering Fordite a bygone vestige of American automotive history. A quick search on Etsy would present you with the chance to get your hands on your very own colourful chunk of polished slag. Just don’t expect it to promote inner stability, balance your chakra or elicit metaphysical vibes of a higher power.

The long, short & winding road to happiness
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Ben came and held some wellbeing workshops focused on happiness with us at UF. Here he shares with us his own recipe for happiness (take note!).

Hello, my name is Ben Caunt. I am a clinical psychologist, therapist and yoga teacher by trade, a family man, friend and loved one in my relationships, a surfer and nature lover. I have done a few recent training sessions with the Universal Favourite team on the topic of happiness. Happiness is a topic I have thought, studied and meditated on for most of my adult life. Yet I hesitate to use the word happiness for the inner sense of fulfilment and of a life well lived I wish to describe. It is relatively easy to write about happiness and yet living a life full and well lived is both beautifully simple and deeply challenging.

I believe that our journey towards true happiness rests on the continuous reflection on two important questions. What does happiness mean to me? And what is my personal path towards deep and lasting happiness? Some small handful of years ago I completed my masters thesis and published an article on understanding peoples’ recipes for long-lasting happiness. Two important lessons I have learned in the years since are that the best recipes change with the flow of time, and each individual’s recipe is a magical thing unique to that person. Recently I have found myself focusing less on the practical components of a life well lived and more on the deeper themes of what makes me feel a sense of lasting fulfilment over time. Here is my recipe for today…

Ingredient #1: Connectedness

Devote yourself to living a life that is connected. To me this means looking within myself to find what is important to me, and what gives me energy, inspiration and meaning. Find your moments of connectedness and flow and use these as a guide to what is important to you. As your awareness of what is important to you grows put your energy to these things.

Ingredient #2: Commitment

Take a committed and practical approach to making sure you prioritise what is important to you. Schedule time for your family, friends and loved ones, be committed and attentive to your work, schedule a lunch hour and enjoy your meal, spend time in nature to revitalise. I am a passionate surfer and waterman so I make sure to make space for my time in the ocean. Be willing to diarise and create routines that provide the space and time to connect. And make sure you spend this energy on the things that are important to you. This can take effort but the reward is unmeasurable.

Ingredient #3: Fluidity

Once you have made space, put your heart into the activity you are doing. You have chosen to make time for this because it is important to you. Be mindful, meaning devote yourself to this activity with a fluid and intentional awareness that gives the best possibility of enjoyment. Don’t expect too much, but do put all you can in. I have been using a simple mindfulness practice of tuning in as deeply as I can to each of my senses as I walk down the beach to the ocean. This generally gives me a more connected and enjoyable experience.

Ingredient #4: Sadness

Once you have made space, put your heart into the activity you are doing. You have chosen to make time for this because it is important to you. Be mindful, meaning devote yourself to this activity with a fluid and intentional awareness that gives the best possibility of enjoyment. Don’t expect too much, but do put all you can in. I have been using a simple mindfulness practice of tuning in as deeply as I can to each of my senses as I walk down the beach to the ocean. This generally gives me a more connected and enjoyable surfing experience.

Ingredient #5: Devotedness

Stay connected as best you can through these sad and challenging times. We cannot constantly chase moments of perfect joy and clarity. I have learned that hard times are essential for understanding what is important to me, and what I wish to devote myself to. If we are brave enough to tune in we can see that things fade and die and pass away. Being connected through hard times is as much part of a life well lived as our bright and bouncy moments, perhaps more. Happiness is a long short and winding road:

Happiness is a long, short and winding road

Can you shake off all your personal baggage and be deeply happy right now? Certainly you can. You are something far greater, deeper and more expansive than you think. And the core of who you are is happiness.

Experiencing these moments of deepest joy is part of happiness, but it is not the whole picture. Long-lasting happiness is the journey of a lifetime. Stay devoted to seeking for the things that make your heart feel full. Watch these change as you age and try to evolve with these changes and be open to them. Your individual journey toward happiness is the only single journey that is right for you. If there is one thing I believe deeply to my core it is that no two people’s journeys to inner happiness and living in the world peacefully can be quite the same. So read, reflect, learn and introspect, while realising the answers you seek are ultimately found within you. They are your own and they are unique to you.

Simply Cyrillic
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Learning about the Cyrillic alphabet

In the name of trying things for the first time, once a month (or more) we take turns in organising a fun activity for everyone to learn something new. This month’s UF Minister of Culture, Plamena, surprised us with an introduction to the Cyrillic alphabet. She told us the story of the script’s origins and showed us some past and present examples of Cyrillic design.

Have you ever seen those old Soviet posters with backwards R’s and other strange yet familiar characters? That alphabet is Cyrillic, developed in the 9th century by the brothers Cyril (hence the name!) and Methodius. Today in the 21st century, Cyrillic is the written basis for more than 50 languages globally, most famously in Russia, but also in Ukraine, Mongolia and the various -stans, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Bulgaria.

Design before and after computers with Cyrillic

We travelled back to the 60s and 70s to discover one of the most significant European graphic designers of that era – Stefan Kanchev. His clear logo compositions use the relation between Cyrillic fonts and shapes and are inspired from Bulgarian folklore and traditions. And we felt like walking through a labyrinth trying to identify the Cyrillic characters in some of them.

We also learnt how the Cyrillic letters sound and even got to interpret handwriting typographically! In Cyrillic handwriting some characters can be written in various ways that do not really resemble one another. Some contemporary fonts like GT Eesti, a free-spirited interpretation of a Soviet geometric typeface, have already thought about it and use alternative Cyrillic designs to illustrate the differences.

Solar energy in daily objects
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Nowadays we’re used to look at our little screens most of the day so it would make sense to have the possibility to charge our phones while we work, eat or read. Dutch designer Marjan van Aubel previously made a collection of furniture called The Energy Collection in which she showcased how energy and daily objects could be integrated – this time she made an actual table that allows you to charge your phone – on solar energy.

What struck me is how beautiful the design is: somewhat reminiscent of solar panels indeed, but taking it much further by adding coloured glass on the table top and bringing a line pattern in the design of both table top and frame. And it works. Just plug your iPhone into the table and the sun will do the rest. Obviously: the more you leave off the table, the more the table is exposed to sunlight, which is a good motivation to keep your desk tidy and clean at all times, according to the designer. I’m definitely going to get this table as a show piece – just waiting for its release now…